Descriptive Statistics

The first pie chart shows that more than half of the people are
pretty happy (57%) whereas the individuals who report being very happy
and not too happy make up 31% and 12% of the sample respectively.
The second pie chart shows the makeup by different social classes for
the sample. It shows that nearly half of the people fall under the
working class (49.1%) and about 43% of the sample consider themselves to
be middle class. Lower class individuals make up about 5% of the sample
while upper class individuals make up about 3% of the sample.
The third pie chart shows that nearly half of the people are more or
less satisfied with their financial situation (~46%) whereas about 27%
of people are pretty well satisfied and 27% are not satisfied at all
with their financial situation.
The last pie chart shows about 48% of the sample are very satisfied
with their job whereas 4.1% of people are dissatisfied with their job.
The percentage of people who are a little dissatisfied and moderately
satisfied are 10% and 38.2% respectively.
Chi Squared Analysis
Level of Happiness by Financial Satisfaction Crosstabulation
|
Happiness Level
|
Financial Satisfaction
|
Total
|
More or less satisfied
|
Not satisfied at all
|
Pretty well satisfied
|
|
Not too happy
|
1964 33.5 %
|
3200 54.5 %
|
704 12 %
|
5868 100 %
|
|
Pretty happy
|
13142 48.7 %
|
7607 28.2 %
|
6210 23 %
|
26959 100 %
|
|
Very happy
|
6321 43.8 %
|
2063 14.3 %
|
6040 41.9 %
|
14424 100 %
|
|
Total
|
21427 45.3 %
|
12870 27.2 %
|
12954 27.4 %
|
47251 100 %
|
χ2=4556.829 · df=4 · Cramer’s V=0.220 · p=0.000
|
The cross tabulation above shows the frequency of happiness levels by
financial satisfaction. We wanted to further examine the relationship
between financial satisfaction and happiness in order to see how
feelings of financial satisfaction can potentially influence how happy
an individual feels in life. According to the chi-squared test of
independence, there is a significant relationship between happiness and
financial satisfaction (p<0.05). This means that an individual’s
level of happiness depends on their feelings of satisfaction with their
current financial situation. More specifically, the table shows that a
majority of individuals (54.5%) that report being not at all satisfied
with their financial situation were not too happy in life. In addition,
almost 49% of people that reported being more or less satisfied with
their financial situation were pretty happy with their life while about
42% of individuals that were pretty well satisfied with their financial
situation reported being very happy in life. The results clearly imply
that the more financially satisfied an individual is, the happier they
are in life.
Level of Happiness by Job Satisfaction Crosstabulation
|
Happiness Level
|
Job Satisfaction
|
Total
|
A little dissatisfied
|
Moderately satisfied
|
Very dissatisfied
|
Very satisfied
|
|
Not too happy
|
1163 19.8 %
|
2270 38.7 %
|
716 12.2 %
|
1719 29.3 %
|
5868 100 %
|
|
Pretty happy
|
2897 10.7 %
|
11812 43.8 %
|
968 3.6 %
|
11282 41.8 %
|
26959 100 %
|
|
Very happy
|
660 4.6 %
|
3986 27.6 %
|
269 1.9 %
|
9509 65.9 %
|
14424 100 %
|
|
Total
|
4720 10 %
|
18068 38.2 %
|
1953 4.1 %
|
22510 47.6 %
|
47251 100 %
|
χ2=4389.595 · df=6 · Cramer’s V=0.216 · p=0.000
|
The cross tabulation above shows the frequency of happiness levels by
job satisfaction. We wanted to further examine the relationship between
job satisfaction and happiness in order to see how job satisfaction can
potentially influence how happy an individual feels in life. According
to the chi-squared test of independence, there is a significant
relationship between job satisfaction and happiness (p<0.05). This
means that an individual’s level of happiness depends on their
satisfaction with their current job. The table shows that individuals
that a majority of individuals that reported being very dissatisfied
(12.2%) or a little dissatisfied (19.8%) with their jobs were not too
happy in their lives. About 44% of people that were moderately satisfied
with their jobs reported being pretty happy in life while 65.9% of
people who were very satisfied with their jobs reported being very happy
in life. Considering that individuals who reported being more
dissatisfied with job also reported being unhappy and those who reported
being more satisfied were more happy shows that job satisfaction may
play a crucial role in how happy individuals are in life.
Graph 1

This figure illustrates the relationship between individuals’
financial satisfaction and general happiness by social class. There is
also a disproportionate number of individuals in the middle and working
class groups in comparison to the lower and upper class individuals. For
lower, working, and middle class groups, a majority of individuals were
more or less satisfied with their financial situation and reported
feeling pretty happy in their life. It is important to note that there
is a similar trend in the middle class group for both job satisfaction
and financial satisfaction in relation to happiness. Middle class
individuals that are highly satisfied with their job or financial
situation were equally high in both the pretty happy and very happy
responses.For upper class individuals, a large number were pretty well
satisfied with their financial situation and reported being very happy
in life. As we can see, the results show that the higher the social
class the more you become satisfied with your financial situation and
the more you report being very happy while the more you go down in
class, the more your satisfaction and happiness become average (as in
more or less satisfied and pretty happy).
Graph 2

The figure above looks at the relationship between individuals’ job
satisfaction and general happiness by social class. For context, there
is a larger number of working and middle class individuals than upper
and lower class individuals. The results show that many lower class
individuals were very satisfied with their job and that those same
individuals were pretty happy overall. A majority of working class
individuals were also very satisfied with their job and were also pretty
happy. Interestingly, many middle class individuals were very satisfied
with their jobs but reported being equally pretty happy and very happy
in their lives. The upper class individuals were the only group that had
more very happy individuals with very high job satisfaction. In other
words, most individuals within the four social class groups were very
satisfied with their jobs but only upper class individuals had more very
happy individuals compared to pretty happy individuals. These results
provide some insight into how social class may have a greater influence
on individual’s feelings of financial satisfaction and thus also
influencing their feelings of happiness in life.
Time-Series Analysis
We created one subset of dataframe by adding a column of percentage
valueof every possible combination of happiness, year and job
satisfaction and similarly another subset for that showed percentage
value of every possible combination of happiness, year and financial
satisfaction.

The graph tells us a story of how job satisfaction relates to the
level of happiness, over time, of the surveyed individuals, with time
being on the x-axis, the percentage of happiness on the y-axis (with its
subcategory description in the legends that are right aligned), and the
job satisfaction in a matrix of panels where each panel represents one
subcategory of job satisfaction. It is visible that a little amount of
discomfort is imminent in human lives, which is exactly what the data
tells us when we see that there is a group of people who are a little
dissatisfied irrespective of the amount of happiness that they tend to
experience in life. When it comes to being moderately satisfied by their
job, we can see that this sub-metric is directly proportional to being
moderately happy in life. It is also evident that the people who are
very dissatisfied with their jobs tend to have very low levels of
happiness as opposed to the people who are satisfied with their jobs,
where the percentage happiness number is relatively high for pretty
(moderately) happy and/or very happy people. If we add on to this by
studying it based off of the x-axis, which is time, we can say that we
see a sudden upward movement from 1998 to 2000 for the percentage value
of pretty happy and very happy people, which is exactly where the
professional and business services industry took off (as per the United
States Bureau of Labor Statistics) because of feature-rich computers
that had been commercialized and reliable technology came into being,
which naturally meant a decline in the not-so-happy percentage. This is
important in proving the validity of the data because moderately
satisfied people are usually the ones who are earning just enough to not
suffer but not enough to call themselves rich, and the sectoral shift
from the manufacturing-heavy job sector to the professional and business
services sector meant more job opportunities for the middle class
families. The second major movement in the graph worth pointing out is
when the global pandemic hit the United States. We see a symmetry in the
not-very-happy percentage going up while the happiness percentage values
are coming down irrespective, especially amongst the people who were
very satisfied with their job as the country came to a stop due to a
lockdown and people lost their job in the process.

This plot illustrates the relationship between financial satisfaction
and level of happiness over time for the surveyed individuals, with time
on the x-axis, percentage happiness on the y-axis (with its subcategory
description in the legends that are right aligned), and financial
satisfaction in a matrix of panels where each panel represents one
subcategory of job satisfaction. It is visible that when we stack a big
picture metric like financial satisfaction against job satisfaction, and
inside, if we look at people who are more or less satisfied with their
financial status, we find that there are a huge percentage of people who
are moderately happy and even very happy, with the not too happy
percentage being on the low until COVID-19 hits the country, after which
the not too happy value goes up, bringing down the very happy percentage
equally dramatically. The people who are moderately happy in this
category have a high number, which is directly proportional to their
being partially satisfied, and this value is contrary to the not too
happy and very happy values as it goes up, which can be backed up by the
fact that these people are generally in the middle class or small
business category, and COVID-19 gave them a huge opportunity to be
profitable from their small or local businesses while all the big firms
were shut down.When we move on to people not satisfied at all, we see
that the happiness percentage never broke the 20 percent barrier and
stays below that even after a gradual rise from 11.95 percent in 1972
and hitting the barrier three times in 1983, 1993, and 2010,
respectively. The very happy number, as expected, stays at the lowest of
the lows for not financially satisfied people, and the not happy
percentage very slowly goes up with the rise in inflation over all these
years with a steep upward movement, and this value represents the people
already having financial problems, which rose after COVID-19. This is
justified by the very happy number going further down along with the
moderately happy number going down. If we move on to the last part of
our graph, we find both happiness values pretty higher than the not too
happy value, which makes sense considering the group we are highlighting
right now is pretty well satisfied, and as the inflation rate went up
along with time, we saw a slow and steady rise in the unhappiness
percentage with a more steep climb from 2018 to 2020, which effectively
caused a sharp fall for the very happy value, even for the pretty well
satisfied group of people, which can be justified by the combined
negative effect of inflation and COVID-19 affecting jobs and businesses
alike.